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An attorney who helped Hazleton write and defend its immigration act 10 years ago is now helping Donald Trump with his transition to the presidency.

Kris Kobach, the secretary of state in Kansas, joined the president-elect’s transition committee and has been mentioned as possible nominee for United States Attorney General or director of the Department Homeland Security in the Trump administration.

“Having the opportunity to work with him, he’s one of the brightest legal minds that I’ve come to know,” U.S. Rep. Lou Barletta, R-Hazleton, said.

Barletta, also a member of Trump’s transition committee, teamed with Kobach to support Hazleton’s immigration law when Barletta was the city’s mayor.

Though they are both members of the transition committee, Barletta said he and Kobach aren’t working as closely as they did on the immigration case.

“We’re doing transition work from different states,” Barletta said.

They have kept in contact — Barletta said they spoke last week — since Hazleton lost challenges to its immigration law.

The law would have penalized landlords for renting residences to immigrants who lacked legal status to live in the country. Employers also faced sanctions if they hired immigrants who weren’t authorized to work in the United States.

Kobach helped the city revise the law to provide due process to immigrants, landlords and employers and to meet other constitutional standards.

Immigrants living and working in Hazleton challenged the law with assistance from the American Civil Liberties Union and LatinoJustice PRLDEF.

After a trial in U.S. District Court in Scranton, Federal Judge James Munley ruled the law unconstitutional in 2007 and said the federal government, not cities, sets immigration law.

The Third Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia upheld the ruling twice after the U.S. Supreme Court ordered the judges to reconsider the case in view of its decision regarding an immigration law in Arizona.

The Supreme Court upheld an Arizona law, which Kobach also helped write and which required employers to use a federal data base called E-Verify to check the immigration status of new workers.

While Hazleton collected nearly $500,000 in donations for its legal defense, the city still paid $1.45 million in legal fees after losing the case.

Joseph Yannuzzi, who succeeded Barletta as mayor, said Kobach helped raise money to defend the law.

Yannuzzi and Barletta pointed out that while the Third Circuit rejected Hazleton’s law, two other circuit courts upheld provisions similar to Hazleton’s law in cases that Kobach defended.

The Ninth Circuit kept the hiring provisions of Arizona’s law, while the Eighth Circuit upheld an immigration law containing housing provisions in Freemont, Nebraska after Kobach represented the municipality.

Different rulings from different circuits, Barletta said, show the significance of the power that Trump will have to appoint justices to the Supreme Court and lower federal courts.

Trump has said he wants to expel immigrants with criminal records and made campaign promises to build a wall on the Mexican border to control immigration and ban or screen the immigration of Muslims.

kjackson@standardspeaker.com

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